LOTRO: A week full of raiding

New recurring topic

This is the first post of (hopefully) a range of posts concerning end-game in Lord of the Rings Online. I've been wanting to write about my raiding adventures for some time now, but I could never find the right format to do so. To be honest, I'm scared that I'll bore you to death with it. I'm targeting for a raiding news post (can be long, can be short) each one or two weeks on Thursdays, as that's when the locks have reset - so you'll know when to avoid this blog at all costs read up!

What you cannot expect:

Nice high quality screenshots of Tower of Orthanc. I have to put my graphics on medium in order not to lag in raids, so you end up with a quality such as of the picture above. If I'm doing something involving fog or waterfalls (Acid, Shadow, Saruman - sigh), I might even need to put my settings on (very) low. Also, perhaps contrary to expectations, I'm not the "Sorry to wipe your raid, but I got these amazing screenies!" type of girl. Much to the unconsious delight of my fellow raiders.

What you can expect:

Long, boring summaries of raiding events. Okay, I'll try to keep it to a limit. I am aware of my inability to write short, to-the-point posts, though. If I really get out of hand, feel free to let me know. That counts for any advice, actually: I'm always happy to hear what you'd like to see.

Three chicks awaiting a Saruman slaughter. 

This week's raiding news

This is good as any week to start off, and in fact, the past week was an insane raiding week for me. Just to be clear: I don't raid this much each week! Here we go:

Thursday - Acid T2

A great start of the raiding week by actually making Acid T2 for the first time. I was on rune-keeper, killing a troll with my boyfriend on champion. The other troll add was being done by another RL couple, also on rune-keeper and champion, which I thought was fun. We failed the challenge, though, because some people got caught in the acid shower (sigh), but I'm still feeling happy we made it. Such a difference from the end of March. It wasn't even that hard in the end. It was extra fun because we are the first of my server I know of who did it without stacking burglars (we only had one), although I guess that tells more about the size of my server.

Friday - Draigoch, Fire & Ice T2

First I brought my captain to a Draigoch run with friends, and she could get the last piece of her set, the head piece. Extra healing from Healing mark, hurray! In the evening I did Fire & Ice with my kinship, which was smooth as always.

Saturday - Lightning T2

I usually don't raid in the weekends, but this time my boyfriend and I promised to help out a befriended kinship. They have cleared all of the Tower of Orthanc on T1 but not anything on T2 yet. The first two trash pulls went remarkably well, but the third one was a horror. They had never come that far, though, so people were really fanatic and wanted to complete it. Two and a half hour later (it was getting 2am) we finally gave up and were going to take one last go. So we made some fun, popped some useless cooldown skills (racial skills, Dunland clicky + shout "For Honour, Duty and Love!") and ran in... and made it right away! It was brilliant, but sadly enough we found out that aggro swapping between warden and champion on the boss was not doable (there were no guardians available). I heard later that "For Honour, Duty and Love!" made it into the kinship message of the day.

Sunday - Shadow T2

We had some good tries on Shadow T2 challenge following a new strategy. We didn't make it yet, but the new strategy seems to work out well since DPS was very high. Even with my DPS'ing on rune-keeper. This was promising and much fun.

Monday - Nothing

Can you believe it? Nothing! We were supposed to go Saruman with the befriended kinship of Saturday, but the login server failures destroyed that idea. As my friend said: "Saruman gets to live one more day..."

Tuesday - Saruman T1

My boyfriend and I completed Saruman with the kinship of Saturday. I took my captain and it was great to have the deed done on her. I'll now really have to start thinking about which ToO and which Ettenmoors pieces I'm going to get on her (I'm aiming for three pieces of each).

Wednesday - Saruman T2/1
And we fought Saruman again! This time with my own kinship and I was on my own old lore-master. First some T2 tries in which we got further than ever, which was very cool. I love the coordination and concentration involved in this fight. I also love dazing stuff, so I'm totally at my spot here. The only downside is that my computer lags horribly whenever we get a frost environmental phase. When it became late, we completed T1 to get people sorted on alts.

Well, that certainly was a hell of a raiding week. It won't be that much each week, I promise! Hopefully I'll find some more time for non-raiding stuff and SWTOR the coming week.